General Remarks

Since Google revolutionized the web search business some years ago, there have
been more changes in this important thing. In the following I give you my
personal recommendations about it and while you may save this page, I recommend
bookmarking it, because I intend to keep it current in this quickly changing area. If availabe and useful, several alternatives are listed, commented and often ranked too.

Classical Web (Content) Search

1. Google — features one of the largest databases, caching of documents, highest relevance and includes also documents like PDF, PostScript and some more proprietary formats besides HTML
2. All the Web (FAST) — similar big index as Google, offers some more special media searches (maybe this engine is better known by Lycos, which uses it too)
3. Yahoo! — using the independent
Inktomi crawler since short (again), it is also worth to be tried with a pretty
big index
(OpenFind — interesting new engine with also
rather big index and a proxy cache similar Google, looks promising)